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ambitiousslab

@ ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

Posts
28
Comments
66
Joined
4 mo. ago

  • What's the best way to (start) learning a language?

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  • I used Language Transfer and Michel Thomas' courses when starting to learn Italian and found them really helpful in getting a foothold into the language.

    The Michel Thomas course was longer and went in more depth, but I preferred the vibe of language transfer. The Michel Thomas course seemed to be aimed at people looking to cheat on their wife on a business trip, because a lot of the conversation was about inviting women to get a drink :( Despite that, it was still useful.

    Unlike the language apps, these courses did a good job of getting me to think in real-time. Despite only being able to express and understand basic things, they gave me confidence to try and say things. Even without much vocab, I was able to express myself in a simple way: "I like that red thing over there", and I was able to pick up new words with "what does this part mean?" or "can you repeat?" etc. So far, it's the best method I've found to bootstrap enough of the language to start talking and picking up the rest by osmosis.

  • Gorton & Denton Parliamentary by-election: what the constituency polls say

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  • Government abandons plans to delay 30 council elections

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  • He added that the government would provide an extra £63m to the 21 areas affected.

    This issue has trundled on for so long, the concern being cost on local government, and then it turns out it can be sorted out overnight with just £63m.

    If you ran on a pledge to clean up politics, and you're up against Reform saying "they're all the same and all as bad as each other", then it should be obvious that delaying elections because you're scared about the results is not a good look.

  • Test with tags

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  • What's the point of switching to Discord alternatives, if they're going to be subject to the same age verification laws?

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  • Many very small services will just not bother with compliance. And the risk of enforcement on them might be low.

    If you use a federated alternative, you can switch to a server that doesn't bother with compliance without losing your contacts.

    Many of the laws don't specify how the age check should be done. There are more privacy-friendly ways to comply, like running a server for your friends or family and already knowing they're over 18.

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • Ooooo, someone's getting worried!

  • Independent News - an idea for aggregating independent journalism

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  • I like the idea and also want to support independent journalism, but in the UK context, I don't think a separate community makes sense. I had a look at !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk and I think most (70%+) of the posts from my unscientific sample would count as independent (in the sense of "free from government and corporate interests, and not controlled by a major media conglomerate").

    I wonder if it would make sense to set up a bot to automatically crosspost articles from allowlisted domains from these general news communities? And if unknown links were found, there could be a mechanism to add them to the allowlist?

    These were the sources I found:

    • The Guardian
    • Al Jazeera
    • Novara Media
    • The Canary
    • Socialist Worker
    • Morning Star
    • Democracy for Sale
    • BBC
    • Politics Joe
    • ITV
    • New York Post
    • Metro
    • The National
    • Associated Press
    • Big Issue
    • London on the Inside

    A lot depends on the definition of independent, and I'm focused on the text rather than perhaps the intent of the definition. If that was stronger, a lot of these could be excluded and a separate community might make more sense.

  • If you want to know what Reform would be like in power, look at how it threatened Bangor University | Gaby Hinsliff

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  • Bangor debating and politics society responded that “in line with our values” it was declining his offer, expressing “zero tolerance for any form of racism, transphobia or homophobia”.

    Reform’s Zia Yusuf thundered on X that Bangor got £30m from taxpayers and he was “sure they won’t mind losing every penny of (their) state funding under a Reform government”. And that’s where it suddenly got serious.

    Anyone who thinks that Reform will not just copy every part of what has happened in the US, has the wool over their eyes.

  • FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

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  • I agree with you, and I think there's a tension between the technical solution (meeting users where they are) and political solution (persuading the users to come to our way of thinking).

    The technical solution is an unequal fight. We have to provide a familiar and equally good experience - integrating everything into these easy-to-use everything apps, on a shoestring budget compared to the proprietary apps. And, without the "education", users will converge on particular instances because that's what's most convenient, giving a lot of power to particular players in the network.

    If we can persuade people to prioritise freedom over convenience, then we end up with a much more resilient userbase who will go help with the existing networks.

    I don't know how we can make people care, though. The free software movement has been trying for 40 years to make regular users care, but the message only really lands with developers. There's certainly more interest in taking down big tech nowadays, but convenience still seems to come first.

  • FR#153 – What does a Discord replacement look like?

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  • Searching for a single Discord alternative may be asking the wrong question however. Discord itself is an extensive bundle of functions smashed together: real-time chat, persistent forums and documentation, voice chats, events and even games. Rather than replicating that bundle in a single app, the open social web may be converging on a different model entirely, where specialised services handle specific functions while sharing identity and social connections across protocol boundaries. These individual services themselves do not have to share the same protocol underneath, and may actually work better if they don’t, with each protocol handling the part it is best designed for.

    This is the most interesting part to me. Can users be persuaded to have different expectations from the proprietary apps they're used to?

    Whenever these sudden migrations happen, the alternatives that win seem to be the ones that look and behave as similarly to the proprietary app as possible, as the people switching don't care about decentralisation, and are much more sensitive to any changes in experience.

    I think we need to create separate experiences, backed by the same protocol, for people who care about decentralisation and freedom (and discover the fediverse naturally, outside of these big migrations), and those that show up during the big migrations.

    For the first group, we want software that's easy to self-host, customisable, spreads users between instances, ultimately empowers them to have the exact experience they want. For the second group, we should just copy the exact experience of the proprietary networks as much as the protocol allows.

    Of course, the risk is that we get even larger influxes of people who never had to learn the community norms. Is that worth it? - I'm not sure.

  • Programming @programming.dev
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    What Functional Programmers Get Wrong About Systems

    www.iankduncan.com /engineering/2026-02-09-what-functional-programmers-get-wrong-about-systems/

  • Revealed: Corporate donations to British politics have tripled

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  • It's scary to see the UK going down the same steps as the US. It's like we're sleepwalking into it, having seen the effects, without really acknowledging what's happening.

  • UK Politics @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Revealed: Corporate donations to British politics have tripled

    democracyforsale.substack.com /p/revealed-corporate-donations-to-british

  • Page views for "Zulip" Wikipedia article skyrocket after Discord announces its age verification nonsense

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  • Zulip has a big jump, but worth pointing out that this is part of a wider trend, and other software has seen bigger jumps.

    The export function doesn't include the legend, so the order from top to bottom by the final day of the graph is:

    • Matrix
    • Signal
    • XMPP
    • Zulip
    • Stoat
    • Rocket.Chat
    • Mattermost
    • Discourse

    Thanks for introducing me to this tool. I hadn't come across it before and it's pretty nifty!

  • Lewis Hamilton says new F1 rules 'ridiculously complex' and 'none of the fans are going to understand it' - BBC Sport

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  • While I'd much rather see drivers go flat out all the time, I don't think this will be a problem.

    There were always reasons for drivers not to push as hard as they can - be it the super delicate pirellis, or saving fuel when refueling was a thing. WEC also has long stretches of lift and coast, and it doesn't really impact the racing.

    Ultimately, a casual fan will see that one car is going faster and another is going slower. It doesn't really matter why. As they watch more, they'll organically learn more about the constraints the drivers operate under.

  • Removed

    YSK that Dark Chocolate is healthier than White Chocolate and Milk Chocolate

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  • I bought someone I fancied 99% chocolate as a joke. After a year or so, we got together. I opened the cupboard one day and saw it there, unopened. It came upon me to eat it :)

    I love dark chocolate and until that point I thought the darker the better. Since then, I realised that I top out around 85%.

  • Mental Health @lemmy.world
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    How to stop work anxiety impacting the rest of my life?

  • UK Politics @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    McSweeney’s think tank paid PR firm to investigate journalists

    democracyforsale.substack.com /p/exclusive-morgan-mcsweeneys-labour-together-investigators-journalists
  • United Kingdom @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    'It is jaw-dropping': Ian Hislop on Mandelson and Epstein

  • Does anyone else get phrases stuck in their head the same way songs do?

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  • Ok, I know this is crazy, but I've had one phrase go round in my head for at least the last 15 years:

    No thanks, I really would not like that please, thank you very much.

    When I was a child, some intrusive thoughts would pop into my head that bad things would happen in random situations, unless I did certain things. E.g., if I didn't breath in at least 15 times before the end of a song, or take an even number of steps before someone said something, then I would suddenly die.

    My brain developed the lore that, when these thoughts popped into my head, they would be binding unless I repeated the above phrase in my mind over and over again. I think it started off as "no thanks", and gradually got expanded to its current crazy form.

    Although I don't believe that anymore, the phrase is firmly implanted in my mind and pops up several times a day. It's probably one of the few things I've remembered verbatim for so long, and it's completely useless :D

  • Removed

    Screen time needs to be regulated ?

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  • For me, the problem is not all screen time, but big tech proprietary software companies. I don't support regulating screen time, but I do think governments should regulate big tech companies harder, while investing in free software - that genuinely serves user interests and has no incentive to be addicting or harmful - as an alternative.

    Big tech explicitly tries to keep people addicted, whatever the consequences. They don't support user agency. Even if you want to make Facebook/Instagram/TikTok etc. less addicting, you are limited to a "show less like this" button that probably does nothing. On iOS and Android, companies abuse the notification categories, and yet there's no way to filter out keywords or work around this, despite the widespread abuse of user attention.

    If everyone had full control over their own (or their child's) devices and algorithms, I doubt there would be such a backlash against technology as a whole. But, despite all the bad the techbros are doing, technology can be so empowering when it serves the users. To regulate screen time seems to me to treat the amazing parts of technology the same as the worst parts.

  • Removed

    Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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  • I would like it if, in all incidents, the self driving car companies were required to release to the public all of the video feeds for 30s before, during and 30s after.

    That would prevent situations like with Cruise, where they released the first part of the video, and neglected to talk about running the pedestrian over after hitting them.

    Then, we can judge for ourselves whether we think the car behaved correctly or not. In most cases, it should be obvious if there was any more it could have done.

  • ProcessOne (ejabberd) just released a new XMPP client - it works on mobile!

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  • I just miss ad-hoc commands, which Fluux already does. I’d prefer libadwaita as well, but having a way to config my IRC transport on the go is great. Gajim mostly works on the phone, but now as well as Fluux.

    That makes a lot of sense. I hope it works well on the phone!

    Pretty sure there’d be a community fork pretty quickly, as this is already one of the clients with the most clean UI.

    Yeah, in fairness I'm probably overreatcting a bit. One of the things I really like about XMPP is the diversity of stakeholders and developers. I would be really sad if that went away.

  • ProcessOne (ejabberd) just released a new XMPP client - it works on mobile!

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  • I'm really happy to see that they shamelessly ripped off discord. We saw with bluesky that having an ultra-familiar UX is a big advantage.

    For mobile linux, I'm going to stick with Dino. I like that it is lightweight, natively supported and integrates well with the rest of the system thanks to libadwaita.

    I'm disappointed that contributors have to sign a CLA that allows them to relicense to proprietary licenses. So, all the power goes to them.

  • If you have one, how much do you pay for a domain name? Any cheap registrar recommendations?

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  • I use mythic beasts. They are not the very cheapest, but they offer predictable pricing and just charge a fixed increase compared to the price they pay their supplier. You can trust that they won't mess around with the renewal price or arbitrary extra fees.

    For my .org domains I pay ~£15 per year, but if you don't care about the tld, you can get some for ~£6 per year (the costs on the website exclude VAT, but if you buy multiple years at a time, the amortised cost including VAT ~= the price excluding VAT).

  • Fediverse memes @feddit.uk
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    Every time

  • OpenStreetMap community @lemmy.ml
    ambitiousslab @feddit.uk

    How to query the map offline, on Linux?